110+ Best Charles Bukowski Quotes and Poems You Should Definitely Read!

Before getting towards best Charles Bukowski Quotes, We will look at who Charles Bukowski was:

Henry Charles Bukowski was a German-born American poet, short story writer & a novelist. It was in the late 1950’s when Bukowski’s poems were published in “Gallows”, a poetry magazine which by Jon Griffith(publisher).

Bukowski’s relationships with different women served as a basis for many of his stories & poems. His works were mainly based on the depravity that the urban society faced & that part of society which was considered as downtrodden.

Bukowski’s works were based on his experiences as well as were fragments of his own imaginations. Many critics termed his style of writing as offensive probably because Bukowski used violent oratory & sexual imageries in his writings.

Charles Bukowski Quotes:

Here is the handpicked collection of the inspirational and knowledgeable quotes by Charles Bukowski that will make you understand the life in a better way.

“A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.”

“Unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don’t do it.”

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside remembering all the times you’ve felt that way. “

“No light goes out until it goes out. Let’s fight as men, not rats. Period.”

“Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simple don’t give a damn.”

“If I stop writing I am dead. And that’s the only way I’ll stop: dead.”

“We all are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.”

“Men are like children. You had to humor them. They could take no hurt. It was a thing every woman knew.”

“People, mostly I can do without. They don’t fill me, they empty me. I respect no man.”

“Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life. “

“There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you.”

“Well, I said, it’s simple, it’s either you get it down on paper or you jump off a bridge. Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.”

“I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.”

“Perhaps, living through these petty days will get us ready for the dangerous ones.”

“You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”

“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.”

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubt, while the stupid people are full of confidence.”

“Some people never go crazy, what truly horrible lives they must live.”

“You have to die a few times before you can really live.”

“There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.”

“I loved you like a man loves a woman. He never touches, only writes to, keep little photographs of.”

“Those who escape hell however never talk about and nothing much bothers them after that.”

“Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.”

“There is a place in the heart that will never be filled and we will wait and wait in that space.”

“I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”

Best Charles Bukowski Quotes:

“Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who or what we are.”

“If you get married they think you’re finished and if you are without a woman they think you’re incomplete.”

“We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.”

“I never met another man I’d rather be. And even if that’s a delusion, it’s a lucky one.”

“I wasn’t lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could ﬁnd no meaning.”

“If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.”

“We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting”

“I wasn’t a misanthrope and I wasn’t a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.”

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”

“Almost everyone is born a genius and buried an idiot.”

“If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.”

“If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.”

“To do a dull thing with style, now that’s what I call art.”

“The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them”.

“Of course, it’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well”.

“Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I’ll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities”.

“Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way”.

“People with no morals often considered themselves freer, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.”

“Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.”

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“Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they’ll spit on you.”

“That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”

So these were the best Charles Bukowski Quotes we found on internet. Use them wisely and follow his advice.
Which of those quotes and poems was your favourite?